Chapter Fifteen

Maxwell and I got closer. That's how I'm gonna say it, because that's how it happened. There was no big revelation, no spark or any of that shit. We were both shipwrecked and alone, so we drifted together. It's how things happen, you know. Human nature.

I didn't even realize it when it happened. Just that Maxwell spent more and more time downstairs and around me, and he wasn't quite so nasty to me anymore, and I wasn't quite so nasty back, and then the next thing I knew he was sleeping in the same bed with me.

It didn't happen right away. He was the one who too haughty for that; it was me who had ended up asking. I tried to keep him away for a long time, then it just got impossible to act like I wanted him gone. He wasn't going to make it easy, though.

When I told him he didn't have to stay upstairs, he smirked at me knowingly and went up anyways. When the next day I flat out offered my bed to him, he refused, and went right on upstairs.

This went on for a week or more before I finally just caught him 'round the waist before he could get all the way up to the attic flat.

"Maxwell… come to bed," I whispered.

And that time he did. He followed me down, and we went to sleep and that was all. That was all I wanted, and Maxwell was always sure to make it be me who wanted something from him and not the other way around, so he made no advances from there. But I didn't care. We didn't have sex, a lot of the time didn't even touch. Sometimes slept at different times, and then there would only be one of us. But I didn't care. The important thing was that it had stopped being my bed and started being our bed again.

There was other stuff, too. Like his curling up to sleep in my lap after killing the bird was the first time of many. I would always call him into the little studio and he would sit and watch and listen. Once he played guitar and sang. Used an "out loud voice," though it was about the only time I ever heard him that way.

He sounded just as eerily like Brian as he looked like him, playing like that, with the same facial expression and everything. The same fluidly graceful way of moving. I wasn't sure whether I liked it or not, but it was impressive at least.

If I got bored, I would catch him and play around with his wings and stuff, and he would tolerate me while I pulled one open and messed with them and tried to figure out how it would work, for him to fly. Except once I accidentally pinched a nerve or something, and he turned around and bit my hand. I didn't say he had turned into an angel. But it was okay; he took it back. He would always take things back, unless I really deserved it. And sometimes I did, but mostly he would fix things, erase those wounds, and do a pretty damn good job of it.

Some things, though, he couldn't fix.

One time I remember real clearly, he had brought me a brush when he came to curl up on my lap. He was doing that purring thing while I brushed his hair, and kept it up when I moved on to his tail, so I was focusing more on his purring than what he was actually doing.

I thought he was just going to lie still like he usually did in my lap, but I felt this burning on my arm and I stopped brushing to see what he was doing.

He had been licking my arm, but when I stopped, so did he, looking up at me guiltily like he thought perhaps I wouldn't have noticed.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

-Nothing,- he answered.

So I caught his tail again and went back to brushing it, and he laid his head down and went back to purring. Then five minutes later, he started licking at my arm again, harder this time, and I stopped to look and found he was trying to erase the track marks there from the heroin. But no matter how hard he went on licking, they wouldn't go away, just showed up stark as ever.

I let him go on and lick at it until my arm was nearly raw and it felt like the burning sensation that was supposed to heal was eating into my bone. Then I called him off.

"Maxwell, c'mon, cut it out. You've licked me so that I'm practically bleeding."

-It won't go away.-

I shrugged, pulling my arm away from him.

-Why not?-

"'cause I don't want it to go away."